Trying to figure out how to price a bid on land

[speedfreeksteve]

Have been out of this game for awhile but there's a couple of properties coming up this month that I'm interested in purely on the proximity to other property that I own and use. These aren't adjacent or anything, but they are close enough to be useful to me for other purposes.

What I'm trying to figure out is how to best price my bid. I'm just looking to get a deal and not be paying market value like I seem to be seeing in some of these areas. If I miss out on these properties because someone else overpaid I won't lose a wink of sleep.

It seems to me the best approach would be looking at MLS comparables and then bidding someone sort of a discount to that. Does anyone have any rule of thumb that I should be using? This is for land only, there's no structures on these properties.

[Dave2]

Have been out of this game for awhile

What I'm trying to figure out is how to best price my bid. I'm just looking to get a deal and not be paying market value like I seem to be seeing in some of these areas.

Steve:

When you figure out let me know.   For about last two years by my calculation we haven't had normal tax sale pricing but much higher often approaching or even exceeding what I considered market prices.  .  As a result I have not won anything using my normal historic pricing strategy. 

Quality is also lower and that has to be factored into the equation as well as we seem to be getting more brownfield or contaminated properties.  I was given a lot of flak because I tried to warn people.   While I was right and now someone has the problem and there are more of these on the ones coming up.   

In early 2017 on the sell side at least the real estate market was strong enough to allow you to recover if you had a mistake but now in 2018 all it all it seems we have tire kickers and time wasters.  Hopefully in time that will cool down the tax sale bids but until I see it I will just have to keep trying and getting frustrated. 

[speedfreeksteve]

Yeah I think you're confirming my suspicions that the deals have gotten hard to come by as the winning bids are now more often approaching closer to what the market value would be. As an aside, it looks like land prices have shot up in the past 12 months at least according to what I'm seeing on MLS and Kijiji.

I think I'll still take a shot at one that I have my eye on later this month but I'm going to have low expectations as I don't plan to aggressively overbid.